Established: 1993
First Unit Franchised: 1997
Franchised Units: Nearly 1000
Company Owned Units: 2
States Registered In: States Registered In: All States (Currently,
ActionCoach is accepting broker referrals from all states.)
Canada Franchises: Yes
International Franchises: Yes
ActionCOACH 2.0: the Firm Franchise and the
FDD
When starting the Business Coaching industry 30 years ago,
ActionCOACH was a single coach, owner operator model, called a
"Practice", with no territory exclusivity working from a home
office. Along the way, we allowed Coaches to add another coach or
two to their Practice which some did, but most didn't. It was truly
a "be a coach" model.
All the "me too" brands copied and that is largely what the
industry is today, single coaches or very small groups of coaches
mostly working from home offices with no real scalability or
salability. They own a job not a real business and it will die when
they retire.
As ActionCOACH continued to grow and mature, we innovated
various growth models with our best Franchisees who had the biggest
visions. We wanted to create a model that allowed for true wealth
creation, scalability and semi-passive ownership.
We eventually perfected our current "Firm" model which is
designed to be both scalable and highly saleable. It is analogous
to a larger law firm compared to a solo attorney office. The Firm
franchisee can even provide its employee business coaches the
opportunity to "make partner" if the Franchisee wants to allow for
that.
An ActionCOACH Firm can be semi-passive or active and the Firm
is operated from a professional office (a shared office like Regus
or WeWork is sufficient) and has a semi-exclusive territory of
approximately 10,000 businesses in contiguous zip codes. One
executive office can support multiple territories with small
satellite offices allowing for significant economies of scale.
The Firm owner will immediately starts building their team to
both grow faster, have added capacity to support more clients and
even position their staff to buy them out in the future when the
Firm owner elects to retire.
After testing, measuring and tweaking the Firm franchise model
for several years alongside the Practice business coaching model,
in 2022 we were so confident with the model and the future of the
Firm, ActionCOACH officially stopped selling Practices and now only
sells Firm franchises.
The full transition to Firms will continue until all the current
Practice owners eventually retire, upgrade to Firms or get absorbed
by a Firm.
IMPORTANT TO KNOW: In the interim, during the transition
and maturing of Firms, there are several things to note:
- Item 19:
- Since ActionCOACH transitioned to "Firms only" very recently in
2022, we don't yet have many long-term mature Firms.
- Most of our Firms are either newer or are led by long term
former Practice owners who upgraded their franchise to a Firm.
- We still have a lot of legacy Practice owners who are
grandfathered and by their nature of wanting to be self-employed as
a "coach" have far more modest income goals.
- Therefore, as strong as our Item 19 is, the financial
representation is not yet nearly as strong as the Firm model is
actually designed to deliver or what they will hear directly from
our Firm builders during due diligence.
- So, simply tell them it is a very strong Item 19 and that they
will be very impressed with the financial model compared to
anything else in the industry or in other industries that typically
require long leases, inventory, build-out, etc.
- We will guide them on the specifics and the existing Firm
owners will validate the opportunity.
- Item 20:
- Prior to focusing on the Firm franchise model, we were very
coach centric and counted each individual coach as a "unit", even
if they did not own the franchise.
- In 2021 when we knew the Firm franchise model would truly be
our future, we realized most "coaches" going forward would be
employees (W2 or 1099) of our Firm owners.
- We therefore decided to reclassify non-franchise owner coaches
in Item 20. To do so, we had to "terminate" the business coaches
who were not franchise owners in the FDD, even though these
coaches were still here as employees/contractors of Firm
franchisees or Practice franchisees.
- This reclassification and explanation are explained in
footnotes in the FDD under Item 20.
- On the surface, it can appear as if we had a large exodus of
"units" a few years back when it was merely a reclassification of
coaches who didn't own the franchise in the first place.
- This is something we explain to your candidates so they can
read the FDD in its proper context.
During the Due Diligence process, we explain those dynamics so
your candidates will know the history, will be able to envision the
future will understand the FDD. They will validate the
history and the earnings potential directly with our trail-blazing
Firm owners.